The Secret of Toni

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“Yes,” replied Denise. She said this with a simple sincerity that went to Toni’s heart.

“You know every time I wrote to my mother I always put the most important line at the bottom—my love to D. She knew what I meant.”

“Yes,” said Denise, with a little gasp of pleasure, “she always gave me your message.”

“I always felt that sometime or other we should be Denise and Toni as we had been when you were a dear little girl and I was a dirty bad little boy. And Denise, I swear to you, whatever I have done wrong in my life, I have been true to you. I never told any other girl that I loved her, because I never loved any other girl. I took my fling with them, but in every girl I ever saw in my life it seemed to me that I saw something of you, Denise. You need not think that women in the circus are bad just because they are in the circus. There are plenty of them that are just as good in their way as—as Mademoiselle Duval is in hers. They don’t take a religious newspaper, but they stand by each other in their troubles. They help with each other’s children and when a woman’s husband gives her a black eye all the other women fly at him and help to abuse him. Oh, Denise, I think women are very good, and the worst of them is too good for the best of men. Denise, I am not half good enough for you, but I want you to marry me as soon as my time is up. I can get off with one year’s service if I escape punishments, and that I have done and mean to do, for your sake, Denise.” He took Denise’s hand in his—their eyes met and then their lips. A bird in the plum tree above began cooing softly to its mate. The bird seemed, like Toni and Denise, to think the earth was Heaven.

Their love-making was very simple, as were their natures and their lives; they were only a private soldier and a sergeant’s daughter, but they loved each other well and asked nothing better of life than love.

Meanwhile things had not been progressing so favorably with Sergeant Duval and Madame Marcel. The sergeant had been a little too vigorous in his wooing and Madame Marcel, who simply had Toni’s advantage in view, felt called on to repress her lover. The sergeant, who had a big voice in his big frame, had made his wishes concerning his future with Madame Marcel quite audible to all the people surrounding them. Everybody had heard him say:

“Now, Madame, you should think of changing your condition, really. The cares of your shop are too many for you—a great deal too many.”

“I have managed them for the past twenty years,” replied Madame Marcel, who thought herself better qualified to keep a candy shop than the sergeant was, and who understood perfectly what the sergeant was driving at.

“True,” said the sergeant, floundering a little, “but a woman should not stand alone—she is not able to do it—that’s the truth. She is being taken advantage of at every turn.”

“And sometimes,” calmly responded Madame Marcel, “the advantage is on her side. I have managed, during my twenty years of widowhood to accumulate a competence. Toni will not be badly off when I die, and when he marries I mean to make him an allowance equal to the income from his wife’s dowry.”